Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 569.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
[1] From: "Kristine L. Haugen" (13)
<klhaugen@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Subject: Re: 14.0565 biographastry?
[2] From: "Fotis Jannidis" <fotis.jannidis@lrz.uni- (18)
muenchen.de>
Subject: Re: 14.0565 biographastry?
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2000 06:18:14 +0000
From: "Kristine L. Haugen" <klhaugen@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Subject: Re: 14.0565 biographastry?
The most suggestive thing I've read is Celia Gittelson's novel 'Biography'
(Knopf, 1991)--the writing is exceptional, and the book is, as Professor
O'Donnell has stipulated, gorgeously nervous about the whole topic. The
story starts as a prospective biographer runs an ad in the New York Review
of Books asking for information on a semi-well-known dead poet; a number of
things, inevitably, happen.
Kristine Haugen
______________________
Kristine Louise Haugen
Princeton University
Department of English
22 McCosh Hall
Princeton, NJ 08544 USA
Permanent email: k-haugen-1@alumni.uchicago.edu
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 19 Dec 2000 06:18:56 +0000
From: "Fotis Jannidis" <fotis.jannidis@lrz.uni-muenchen.de>
Subject: Re: 14.0565 biographastry?
> From: jod@ccat.sas.upenn.edu (James J. O'Donnell)
>
> I am looking for contemporary critical literature on the subject of
> biography-making. I am not looking for advice on how to write a good one,
> but rather for critical reflection on the propensity for making them, the
> intellectual issues raised, the narratological patterns and history. What
> I find is a large literature that rather enjoys biographies and likes
> thinking about them and thinks they are swell: I find very little from
> people who are, as I am, made very nervous by them and wish to understand
> better why they are so popular and what that popularity means for our
> knowledge of the past.
Interestingly. In Germany biographies had a very hard time in
scholarly circles, because models for historical change had shifted
towards structural explanation in the late 60's. I think, the individual
agent has been rediscovered not so long ago, probably in the
context of cultural history, but maybe this has been a more general
change in the intellectual atmosphere.
This all hasn't deminished the general popularity of biographies.
Fotis Jannidis
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